An Open-Source Nonprofit’s Growth and Executive Pay Raise Eyebrows
The Linux Foundation has become a giant among the nonprofits overseeing open-source projects, leading some critics to say it’s losing touch with the movement’s egalitarian roots.
Open-source software has become a big business, even for some of the nonprofit organizations dedicated to coordinating the far-flung communities of programmers that contribute to open-source projects, usually without pay. That’s especially true of the Linux Foundation.
That organization, which oversees the development of the Linux operating system, has seen its revenue soar over the 17 years since it formed, as it has grown to encompass hundreds of other open-source software projects, like Kubernetes, a popular technology for building cloud applications. The Linux Foundation’s revenue was $177 million in 2022—the most recent year for which its tax filings are available—up from $7.5 million in 2007. That makes it the largest open-source nonprofit, by revenue, in the world.
And as the Linux Foundation has grown, so has compensation for its top executives, who are paid handsomely even compared with executives at similar-size nonprofits in technology. In 2022, the median annual compensation for the dozen or so top executives named in the organization’s tax filings was roughly $705,000, 52% higher than it was four years prior. By contrast, the Wikimedia Foundation—which oversees Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia written and edited by volunteer contributors—reported 2022 revenue of about $168 million and had median executive compensation of roughly $376,000.